Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (32 page)

Boris Bagdasaryan was commander of the Echo II that met Tautog. He called his sub the Black Lila.

Captain James Bradley reached back to boyhood trips down the Mississippi to find a telephone cable deep beneath the Soviet Sea of Okhotsk. He is congratulated by Secretary of the Navy John Warner (right).

The Navy announced that Halibut was carrying the first deep submergence rescue vehicle. But that DSRV was a welded-down fake, a disguised decompression chamber for deep sea divers who would tap Bradley's cable.

Fritz Harlfinger, director of Naval Intelligence, knew if Bradley could convince Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig to okay Halibut's search for the cable, no other approvals would be necessary.

Crammed full of stolen sub banners and parts-enough contraband to drive naval investigators mad-the Horse and Cow was where men readied to launch some of the most daring operations of the cold war.

The CIA commissioned the mammoth Glomar Explorer to do what key Navy officials believed too difficult and absolutely unnecessary: to reach down and steal an entire Soviet submarine off the ocean floor.

One of the oldest and most broken subs in the fleet, Seawolf took over cable tapping operations in Okhotsk. She was nearly moored there forever.

When the Soviets discovered recording devices attached to a cable beneath Okhotsk, there was no mistake who had put them there. Inside one of the 20-foot-long pods were the words: "Property of the United States Government." One tap pod ended up in a museum in Moscow.

The Navy feared the tap's discovery in Okhotsk might signal that the Soviets also knew about an even more daring operation being carried out by Parche in another sea.

When Richard Buchanan led Parche on a mission that earned her one of her seven Presidential Unit Citations, President Ronald Reagan compared him to John Wayne.

Waldo Lyon's decades-long adventures and study of the Arctic led him early on to ride with Commander William Anderson (right) on the Nautilus to the North Pole. More than twenty-five years later, Lyon would still be trying to discover how U.S. subs could fight effectively under the sonar-muddling ice.